[verdagon]

Not quite, there are non-GC ways to guarantee memory safety without borrow checking, see languages like Vale, HVM (more a runtime), and Inko.

With those in mind, Rust's complexity does indeed look accidental here. It has its other benefits, but it does make closures a bit more difficult.

[EnergyAmy]

Inko uses automatic reference counting, which you can argue about definitions, but I would consider to be GC. At any rate, it's not relevant to whether Rust's complexity is accidental or not, because Rust specifically doesn't do automatic reference counting, and instead uses the borrow checker at compile time.